


I Got A Rock

by Rubynye



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-09
Updated: 2010-08-09
Packaged: 2017-10-11 00:29:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/106241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rubynye/pseuds/Rubynye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In prison, Suki has a lot of time. And a rock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Got A Rock

  
Title: I Got A Rock  
Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender  
Character: Suki  
Rating: G  
Disclaimer: As ever, not mine.  
A/N: Just a wee ficlet, written for the [Awesome People of Colour Are Awesome Comment-a-Thon](http://medie.livejournal.com/1759238.html).

  
Suki has a rock.

She picked it up from the prison yard on the fourth day after her arrival, when her skin was still taut and itchy with healing burns. The yard is plaster over beaten dirt, swept clean of anything weaponlike under the Warden's watchful eye, and she still doesn't know how this rock survived for her to find it. But she found it, and tucked it into her shirt, and hid it beneath her cot.

It's light gray, a little tapered, broken into a flat plane under the wide end, just rough enough for a whetstone if she had anything to sharpen. It's about as long as her middle finger, about as wide as her nose. It's a rock.

Suki makes herself wait. She steals a shirt from the prison laundry, smaller than hers, and under cover of the morning din she tears it into strips. She hides them beneath her cot as well -- bandages are always useful -- and wraps the widest around the narrow end of her rock. She rolls it, to see how it wobbles, and tosses it, to test its balance.

Then she picks a spot, one arm's length down from the ceiling, and marks it with her eye, and throws the rock. When it thunks against the wall on its bare end her self-punishment is to freeze until she's sure the noise hasn't attracted the guards; she aims to hit with the padded end, the only noise soft rhythmic thumps, and soon she's doing so twenty-four times of twenty-five, then forty-nine times of fifty.

She keeps practicing, changing hands, changing angles, throwing over and over. She pictures the bright round targets she first learned on, splitting a sapling's trunk, that pink-clad acrobat's face. She thinks of the sun rising over Kyoshi island, of Sokka's wide grin, of the smell of warrior greasepaint. One day she'll find her chance to escape, and when she does she'll need to have kept up her aim. So for now Suki keeps on throwing her rock.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] I Got a Rock](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4566948) by [kalakirya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalakirya/pseuds/kalakirya)




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